Talk:Flag Rank
Under the old terms a captain is not flag rank and entitled to a flag. A ship with a captain flew a commissioning pennant. A Commodore got the broad pennant, not quite the square flag. They sort of sat on the fence if you will. Still technically a Captain, but being in command of a fleet of vessels. That is the direct meaning of "Flag Rank" is the commander gets to fly a flag, a rectangular ensign. Current British Admirals use the The cross of St. George, and the fewer the balls on the white field the higher the rank two one or none. American usage is a blue flag with the Admirals stars on it indicating rank.Tesral 05:24, January 16, 2010 (UTC) My Computer is slow todays. There are good reasons for this. (Anti-Virus scanning and DLing some bittorrent files.) SO Wikipedia is slow to load up. The United States Navy went without Admirals for a long time. How did they work it? My impression is that in TOS Admirals were sort of rare. If Starships are analogous to CVNs, and captains commmand them, they we have a sort of Flag-Captain dealie. If Starships Are Analagous to SSBNs then it's different. And if they are Analagous to the '74, then this is different again. TOS seems to have been all over the place on that. TNG and onward were slightly more coherent - but Picard had initiative to treat, conduct diplomacy and command tak forces when required. Jayphailey 21:14, January 16, 2010 (UTC) ASIS closer to the 74. Age of sail Captains where out of touch for long periods of time. We saw admirals all the time, on subspace. As a result they had and needed to have more intuitive than the Captain of a CVN does today. Capitan Average CVN drives his ship where the guy one bridge down tells him to. The CVN will also be the flagship of the task force. CVNs do not wander around by themselves. Frankly I believe what Gene had more in mind was the independent cruiser such as the USS Constitution, the US super frigates that could either take all comers or run faster than anyone they couldn't take. Early on the US had no ships of the line. The Constitution and her sisters were the biggest ships in the Navy inventory. However packing 42 24 pound guns they out gunned everything but ships of the line and a few of them as well. The Enterprise is that Independent super cruiser whose captain has wide latitude to deal with what comes up outside of contact with Starfleet command. "Flag Rank" is still someone that can fly a flag. Rear Admiral or higher. Commodore is a fancy Captain and only "broad pennant rank". "Fleet Capitan" is actually the Capitan of the flagship. It is not a rank so much as a position. I think I have done a decent job rectifying these various terms into a rank structure. Tesral 23:00, January 16, 2010 (UTC) Remember that the flag itself marks the Admiral's ship and is therefore the one you want to look at for orders. The Flag Ship says "Everyone Turn to Port" and Captain H is flying "Quick! Turn to Starboard!" - then you comply with the message flags flying on the Admiral's ship. And that goes to Admiral: Rear Half - or Rear Admiral and such likes. In Trek, the Flasg Ship is going to be the one with the command and control equipment to share information and coordinate the fleet. In Star Fleet Battles they mark this equipment and the fleet command room with "Flag bridge" boxes (They take hits when "Bridge", "Emergency Bridge" and "Auxilary Control" boxes get hit) A cruiser equipped with a Flag boxes is called a "Command Cruiser". In our game, we're assuming that command boxes can be repurposed to fill these rolls, or that the ships are so configurable that an "Option" box can become a "Command" box. Since an Admiral has higher seniority and access, I assume that ships assigned to her will recognize her as the senior officer. But we're sort of stuck with using terms that reflect communications technology that was obsolete since the 1880s. I like it, it keeps the "Hornblower" flavor, but... we may want to account for the terms being stretched and remodelled to fit more modern forms of command and control. Jay ~Meow!~